bbPress Simple?
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I have spent the whole afternoon trying to set up a simple forum for my website http://www.bathastronomers.co.uk. It really needs to be nothing special – it’s just a place for a small group of astronomers to chat and arrange observing sessions. People need to be able to register, post and receive email notifications of replies.
So, first I tried Simple:Press. Installation was pretty simple and it played nicely with WordPress but it is soooo slow – to the point of being unusable.
So then I found this site and was very excited by the slogan “Simple, fast, elegant”… boy, was I in for a shock!
I eventually got the thing installed and spent some time getting it integrated using the “bbPress Integration” plugin. After going through all the steps I got no error meassages until I tried to login. I tried my bbPress username and password but no dice. Then I thought “hey, maybe it is now integrated and I can use my WP usernam and password!”
Yeah, right. That would have been too easy.
I must say that while I totally respect the efforts of the guys making these plugins, the installation procedure and documentation is laughable – it is like some bizarre logic puzzle or riddle. I am not a n00b but I just cannot get it to work. The forum appears to be a completely seperate entity to my WP site and I cannot login. And it’s not just me – a quick google search reveals that there are plenty of people wrestling with the setup of this “simple” forum plugin.
Sorry for the long post but this has been a total waste of an afternoon and I needed to vent. Seems like no-one can make a decent forum for wordpress. Perhaps I will use Joomla for the site…
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JimJiber,
I, we, all feel your pain – but you’re confusing two issues here; because you’re viewing bbPress as a WP plugin. It’s not, it’s a standalone forum, and there is a “bridge” that connects the logins/users to wordpress.
1) bbpress is very very simple to set up and use if you have basic technical knowledge (ability to edit a file and FTP).
2) bbPress is not simple to integrate into WordPress.
It is random, annoying, and requires you to know so much it’s unreal, and most of the information you’re meant to know is buried inside forum threads you’ll struggle to find. If you want to stick with it, shoot us over the steps you took, linking which of the guides on here you followed would be great if possible, and we’ll try and sort you out.
The forum appears to be a completely seperate entity to my WP site
It is, and will be.
Seems like no-one can make a decent forum for wordpress.
You’re kinda right. This is actually really good, but WordPress has a tendancy to change it’s securty protocols quite randomly and often. 2.1, 2.5 and 2.7 all had major changes and whenever that comes we’re all playing catch up. Sadly automattic took the decison to integrate bbPress into BackPress and then decided not to integrate WordPress into BackPress, so we’re left in the state of limbo you now see.
this has been a total waste of an afternoonand I needed to vent.
Thats ok, i cant think of one person that has come to bbpress and gotten integration working on their first day, let alone afternoon. Matt (head of automattic) annouced that Integration was the highest priority to get working back in December, but then decided we should work on anonymous posting instead, so we’re all a tad confused.
Before deciding on forum software or swapping to joomla, i’d spent the time doing a bit of research on them all. There are positives and negatives for many of these – but on the plus side you now know the 2nd biggest flaw of bbPress
Hardly intuitive is it?
No, but then it’s not trying to be
My suggestion is to get your forums working first, without trying integration. Then once you know it’s all working you can follow one of the countless integration guides here, and shout us when things go wrong. Sadly, it’s the best that can happen.
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